The Rise and Fall of the House of Snape
by NezumiPi
Summary: After Voldemort's demise, Harry and his friends set out to piece together the life of Severus Snape. What sort of man was he really, and how did he get to be that way? Was he a hero or a cruel teacher who teased a child about her overbite?
1. Prologue

_The frame of this story occurs in the years immediately following Voldemort's downfall, when Harry would be approximately 19 years old. I have made every effort to be accurate with the canon of the text as well as real Muggle history. It should be noted, however, that I will assume that statements made by characters in the books reflect that character's perception of events at the time the statement was made – that perception may have been faulty or the world may have changed. I have made one change, which pertains to the nature of Pensives. I always thought it was ridiculous that they provided a purely 3rd-person view of one's memories and I have adjusted their function to be a bit more sensible.  
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><p>In their years of battling Voldemort and his forces, Harry had shown a tenacity, a tendency toward obsessiveness that, while annoying, had often steered them well. Hermione had assumed that Harry's driven behavior had been motivated by his cause, and thus, with the war over, it would fade. She was disappointed.<p>

Harry was obsessed, once more, with Severus Snape. He vacillated between suggesting that Snape was really evil throughout, that he must have been forced to obey Dumbedore by some sort of life debt or blood magic and voicing the possibility that Snape had never really been a Death Eater, perhaps had been a spy the whole time. When he did the former, Ron would shrug and mention that he'd never heard of any magic like that. When he did the latter, Hermione would remind Harry that Snape's decision to tell Voldemort the prophecy only made sense if one assumed that he really was loyal to the Death Eaters at the time.

Upon hearing either rejoinder, Harry would become either argue irritably or fall silent. Ron and Hermione quickly learned to avoid topics which would be likely to lead to Snape-related discussions, and with time, Harry seemed to move on. The problem was that the topic could never be entirely avoided. Snape's name was famous, or rather, infamous. No matter how many times Harry had tried to tell the wizarding world of Snape's heroism, he still heard mothers scolding their children, "Quit bickering or Severus Snape will get you!" and he still read Daily Prophet articles which blithely described political maneuver as a "Snape-level betrayal." Snape was a household name for everything foul.

Harry occasionally badgered his friends with questions about Snape, grasping at the slim possibility that they still held a detail or two not previously shared.

"I have no idea," said Ron, "and why does it matter anyway?"

This was the wrong thing to say.

And it explained why Ron's protests were ignored when Harry explained the plan he had arrived at: They were going to write Snape's biography.

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><p><em>Very short prologue, but don't worry, Chapter 1 will be out in the next 24 hours. Actually, don't worry because it's just fanfiction. If you were really worried, I would humbly suggest that you have more serious problems than simply waiting for plot developments.<em>


	2. Snape the Son

Harry had obviously been planning this for some time. Once his idea was out in the open and Ron's initial objections had been fielded, he showed them his list. It was three feet of parchment, though several lines were crossed-out and rewritten. It began with _Pensieve!_ and _Snape's Portrait_, continued through _Hagrid_ and _McGonagall_, past _Auror interrogation records_ and _Search potions classroom_, onto _Interview non-Death Eater Slytherins?_ and _maybe the ghosts know something_.

Hermione looked down the list skeptically. She wasn't confident that the Malfoys were going to talk to them or that Kreacher was really going to provide reliable information. She stopped at a cluster of legal sources. "Aren't those legal records sealed?"

Harry looked a bit uncomfortable. "I really don't think they're going to say no to us." He didn't like using his fame, but it did come in handy from time to time.

"What about his family, mate?" asked Ron, looking at the list over Hermione's shoulder.

"He never married, Ronald," said Hermione.

"I meant, you know, his mum and dad."

"Are they even alive?" Harry was surprised to realize he hadn't even considered the possibility.

The internet made searching for muggles easy, so they started with Snape's father.

"He's...he's on parole from prison," said Hermione, "and I have his address."

* * *

><p>Hermione pounded on the door, gentle knocking having failed to provoke a response. She had just turned from the door when it opened, revealing a graying muggle in loose blue jeans and a dingy white undershirt.<p>

"What do you all want?" The man raised an eyebrow in suspicion.

"W-we were students of your son," stammered Hermione. Then, gaining a bit of confidence, she went on, "We wanted to ask you some questions about him."

Ron and Harry nodded vigorously.

"My son?" The man snorted derisively. "I don't know what you all are on about, but my son died 'round twenty years ago and he sure as hell wasn't any kind of teacher."

"If it helps, he wasn't very good at it," said Ron, before Hermione stamped down on his foot.

The man gave the barest hint of a laugh. "Now that does sound like him."

"You're Tobias Snape, right?" she asked. "Your son was Severus Snape?"

Tobias nodded. "But I never knew nothing about him having students. He was 20, no 21 years old when he died, kind of young to be a teacher, I would say."

Hermione glanced at Harry and Ron, who had both taken a step backward, resolutely silent, clearly more than willing to leave to her the task of explaining that no, Snape had not died at 20, but yes, he was still dead. "Perhaps we could come in?"

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><p>The flat was plain and uninviting. It was clear Tobias had lived there for some time – there were dishes in the sink, expired advertisements on the table – but no photographs of family or friends, no knickknacks or posters, no personal touches of any kind. There were a great many empty beer cans and bottles lying about most any flat surface. Ron and Hermione had settled on a small sofa upholstered in yellowing fake leather, leaving for Harry a pale green plastic lawn chair. Tobias had dragged a chair over from the kitchen table for himself. He had listened silently while Hermione gave a skeletal outline of Severus Snape's life and death since the age of 20, that he had been a teacher at a magical school, that there had been a war between kindly wizards and evil ones, that Severus Snape's brave and clever spywork had been crucial in the defeat of the evil wizards, and that he had been killed at last by the most evil of those wizards, at the age of 38.<p>

Tobias seemed surprisingly accepting of the idea that his son had hidden 18 years from him, commenting only that, "The boy always was good at secrets." But he was obviously less comfortable with the idea that his son had been on the side of good. "So you say my son was a hero?" he asked. "You sure it was him?"

* * *

><p>Tobias didn't seem to be the talkative sort by nature, but he had never had the chance to tell anyone about the child he referred to as his "strange and frightening son." He agreed to be interviewed and he consented to a new spell Hermione prepared just for the occasion. It was a modified form of one of the spells used to create a Penseive, she had explained. It provided a fuller image of what a person was thinking, displayed in a pane of frozen silvery smoke, suspended behind the speaker's head.<p>

"To start," said Harry, "could you tell us how you and his mother came to meet?"

Tobias Snape offered a bare framework of how he had left Ireland as a young man and immigrated to Spinner's End, England looking for work, how he had gone from pub to pub with his pals from the mill hoping to pick up a nice lady for the night. "Now I'm no looker myself," he said, "so I learned pretty fast that I would have the most luck with gals who weren't beauty queens themselves, and that could certainly be said to describe Eileen, but that's not what caught my eye. The women usually came in great groups, giggling and gossiping with one another, but she was all alone. Dressed funny, too. So I had been watching her for a good while when she came up and asked me for a dance, and then a walk, and then a date, and pretty soon we were in love."

He leaned forward conspiratorially. "I've always liked strong women, and they don't come stronger than that. Oh yes, she told me soon enough about the witch business." He shrugged, "I didn't bother me over-much, but I admit I took it for foolishness to begin with. But then she showed me one spell after another, told me about the magic schools and towns and all that. I think if I had believed it all at once, it would have spooked me, but I believed in it a little bit at a time, so it was exciting instead."

"After we'd been dating three, four months maybe, she took me to dinner at her father's house. She had told me that he didn't approve of her relating with a non-magic person – she had always got a glint in her eye when she said that. Can't blame her, neither. When you're young, it's fun to break the rules. So I suppose that's why we had the dinner. She wanted to rub his face in it, I guess." The man shrugged as the image behind him displayed a brick manor, not as decadent as the Malfoy's, but luxurious nonetheless. "I can't say I was eager to meet her family, but anything to make her happy. And the prospect of a free meal didn't hurt. We had to go through this weird door to get in, but it was a big place, a nice place. I don't know how money works for your kind, but it sure seemed that her Da was rich."

"Dinner was a disaster. Eileen and her Da were rowing just about as loud as could be and I was just trying to keep my head down. Eileen's two brothers were there and they both kept looking at me in a way I didn't much appreciate." He paused. "I got up to go find a lavatory and I went down the hall. And this was a fearsome place to me, mind you. Maybe it's normal for you magic folk, but I never seen paintings that move and watch you and hiss at you. And then halfway down the hall, I heard somebody screaming. Yelling, really, with a hoarse voice like she'd been at it for hours. You know, 'Help! I'm down here! Help me! Help me!'. Well, I forgot all about the bathroom and I followed the sound and I was quite wondering whether I was going to leave this place alive, but you can't hear a scream like that and just ignore it. So at the end of the hall, there was a door – it wasn't locked – and it lead down into the basement. I went down the stairs and I saw this horrible, horrible room, full of people in cages. Naked, filthy people, with their bodies all messed up. Some of 'em had extra arms, or plants growing out of them, or other stuff because I didn't stay too long, I spun around, and there was Eileen's brothers: Garvin and Mordin. I tell you I had never been so scared. I pushed right passed them, ran down the hall, and grabbed Eileen because she said I couldn't enter or leave without her."

"Believe me," said Tobias, "I wasn't exactly real sweet on her after all of that happened. But – and I'm sure this was no coincidence – she got pregnant a few weeks later.

* * *

><p>"I was..." Tobias paused, "well, I wasn't exactly eager for a baby. It was all happening rather fast, you know. I didn't really want to give up being a bachelor, take on all the responsibility, the usual reasons." He sucked in a breath between pursed lips and a slight smile emerged. They could see warmth in his gaze for the first time since he had greeted them at the door. "But once he was born, it all changed. Oh, oh, I was in love. He looked like her and he looked like me. He had these tiny perfect ears and these cunning little fingers. I could watch him for hours." A laugh. "I had no idea what to do with a baby, mind you. Once I woke him up just to see him smile...didn't work, of course."<p>

The image behind Tobias remained faint, but they could see a man cradling a baby, dancing around a small, dim room. He sang along with Sam Cooke's _What a Wonderful World _as it played over a tinny radio.

"It usually happens to mums, I suppose, that sort of obsession with your kid. But Eileen, well," he paused, "she weren't really the mothering sort." Before they could jump in with questions about what was meant by that, he continued. "I blathered on endlessly about his every little accomplishment. Sev can sit up, Sev can hold his own bottle, Sev calls me Da. The guys down at the mill took to calling me Mama Toby." He trailed off, a half-smile still on his face, clearly enjoying the memory."

"I got him a little mobile for his crib. It had rocket ships on it. It ran on batteries, but we never had money to buy any, so sometimes I would just stand there and spin it for him." He paused. "Sometimes, I would go look in on him and it would be twirling around." His face dropped. "Part of me knew what was going on, that he was going to be magic and she was going to take him to that horrible place with the people in cages. But I could fool myself. I would imagine that Eileen had managed to find some batteries with a charge left in 'em." He shrugged. "She never noticed the mobile at any rate, far as I can tell."

Harry leaned forward. "And what about her? What was she like at that time?"

Tobias gave a long pause, as the window behind him took the form of his answer. Eileen sat in a straight-backed chair, next to a grimy window, eyes unfocused. "They've got a name for it now – post-partum depression, though I suppose I don't know if that happens to your kind. It's supposed to be some kind of hormone thing." Eileen stared blankly at the street below. "I always thought that she was really regretting disobeying her father, marrying a muggle, having a son with him. But who really knows? Whatever it was, she just didn't take to her new life. She barely slept, but she was barely awake either."

"I had to leave Sev with her went I went to work. In fact, I had to work more shifts than usual – she never could get Sev to suckle-" Hermione stepped on Ron's foot before he could giggle at the image, "so we had to buy formula and that was a big expense." He paused, looking somewhat sheepish, perhaps reluctant to speak ill of his wife. "I...I don't think she did a very good job taking care of him. I would come home and he wouldn't have been fed or changed all day. Sometimes, I don't think she ever took him out of his crib."

"Once he got a little bigger, I left him in the living room. She mostly stayed in the bedroom, ignored him, I think. I made sure there was nothing sharp, nothing he could choke on. I cut food into tiny pieces and left it out for him. I left the TV on so he would hear voices at least. It...it didn't seem to be hurting him too much at least, though when I came home, he would cling to me, follow me around the flat. I should've known what it was doing to him."

He looked each one of them in the eye in turn, as if he were teaching them an important lesson. "It's not good for babies to be alone like that, for that long. They're built to be with people. That's how their brains work or something. I read about it in my correspondence courses. It spooks 'em to be alone."

"So," Tobias shrugged, "it was sort of just me and him." A blur of images appeared, some faint, some well defined. A man carrying a toddler on his shoulders, so the boy could see over a crowd. A boy of no more than two, digging in dirt, proudly displaying to his father whatever rock or grub he found. A boy taking off his shoes as soon as his father put them on, again and again, but the fight ended in tickling and laughter.

"Oh, he was so funny, so clever. I used to take him down to the pub with me." At Hermione's look of dismay, he explained, "Didn't seem right to leave him with her any more than I had to and the lads down there thought he was a riot." A pale-skinned, black haired boy of two, perhaps three years, wearing dark brown corduroy overalls with no shirt underneath stood on the bar proper and alternated between singing – shouting off-key really – _There Once Was a Man Named Michael Finnegan_ and turning to Tobias for encouragement.

The boy lightly bit his lower lip in concentration. "Der once was a man named Michael Finnegan." He stopped, looked around, appeared to consider carefully, then sang quite slowly, "He had whiskahs on his chin-negan." He looked to his father, then sang a little louder, a little faster, "Dey gwew out and den gwew in agin'. Pouw ole Michael Finnegan." The men in the bar chorused, "Begin again," and Severus did so, quicker and with more confidence and soon he was riding on his father's shoulders and high-fiving his father's pals.

"You want to know how clever he was? He had just turned two and one of me pals from the mill, a guy named Big Mick tried to play got-yer-nose with him. Big Mick sits down, tugs on Sev's nose, puts his thumb between his fingers and waggles it at him, says 'Oh, oh, oh, I've got yer nose!'. And you know what Sev did? With both hands, he grabs Big Mick's glass of whiskey, looks him right in the eye and says, 'Trade ya.' I don't think we ever laughed so hard."

His tone changed suddenly. "The ladies at the church said he was awful bright. I never knew another baby to compare him to, but they said he was talking really well for such a small guy. You should know," he looked at each of them in turn, "I still treasured him. It killed me to leave him with her. I never had to spank him neither. Most babies, you have to use the rod now and then to get them to obey, but not Sev. You told him once, 'That's dangerous, don't touch that,' and he did what you said. The magic was nothing really, stuff that could have been a coincidence."

Harry shifted uncomfortably. He was having some difficulty following the thread of Tobias Snape's tale. He didn't want to interrupt, but Snape seemed to have fallen silent, his face drawn in a guilty reverie. Harry almost spoke, but Hermione shushed him with a glance. Ron fidgeted uncomfortably, but remained silent as well.

It was really perhaps only three minutes before Tobias Snape spoke again, though it felt like much longer. "Eileen and I used to row a lot. Over anything. She was just miserable in general – she would sometimes brighten up a little for a few months, but she was never happy. She almost never left the house and hardly ever did any magic. So she was miserable and I just kept getting sucked in. I used to say she never talked except to yell. She had taught me the word _muggle_ before, but more and more now she was talking about _mudbloods _instead, which I guess means the same thing, but it just sounds nastier." Hermione did not correct him. "She seemed to have decided that Sev was hers and not mine, that he belonged in her world and not mine. She explained, as if I was just supposed to be okay with it, that if Severus was magic and she sure thought he was, then she would take him to her father's house, away from all the mudblood filth."

"So I started telling him never to do magic, never make things fly or light up or any of that. And he would just look confused, like 'what did I do?' so I would just drop it, let it go and hope she was too much stuck in her own head to notice."

"Sev had just turned five. I remember because he was going to start school in the fall and I was glad that he was finally not going to be home with her all day. So it was a few days after his birthday when we had a terrible row. I don't even remember what it was about. Something stupid. But I was screaming and screaming and Sev was sitting in the corner of the kitchen." Harry suddenly recalled the scene from Snape's memory, the young boy cowering while his father yelled. "And all of a sudden it was quiet. I could open our mouths but no sound came out. I slammed my mouth shut as if I had just decided not to talk to her anymore, but Eileen looked at him like she had just struck gold, she looked greedy for him. And I...I panicked. And I know it was stupid and I know it didn't make any sense, but I was desperate and if there was any chance I could trick her or make her forget about it, I was going to take it. So I grabbed him and carried him out of the house, slamming the door behind me."

The floating screen bore a sharp image now, of a confused and frightened boy carried by a confused and frightened man. "I took him to the creek. It wasn't far. I told him, 'You never do that again!' and for the first time I could remember, he defied me. He said, 'But it's wonderful!'" The man in the image looked horrified, enraged, terrified. He grabbed the boy and shoved his head under the water, screaming only for him to never do it again. He shoved the boy's head into the water over and over, letting him up only for a brief gasp, not enough to truly catch his breath. The boy coughed and screamed and apologized and cried.

When next he spoke, Tobias sounded as though he was crying, though no tears fell. "You all are after a story, if I understand. If there is a villain in your story, it's me. You understand me? If you had asked me, I would have said, I have to keep him safe, I can't let him end up in that terrible place with the people in cages. If you had asked me, I would have said as earnest as could be that if I could just keep him from showing magic, Eileen wouldn't take him away and I could keep him safe." He paused, breathed through gritted teeth. "But I know I just couldn't bear to give him up."

The boy in the screen sniffled and coughed up water and stiffened when his father tried to comfort him. The boy whispered apologies and promises that he wouldn't do it again.

"That night, Eileen left, taking Severus with her. She grabbed his arm and they just disappeared. I felt like shit. I had said that before, when I had a bad day or what have you, but I had never felt worse in my life. I had held my boy, my only son under water. I scared him, I hurt him, and it didn't even accomplish nothing. She still took him."

The window showed a figure, sitting in the dark, taking one swig after another from a liquor bottle.

"Why did she even want him?" Ron caught himself and softened his question, "I mean, you said she didn't really like him that much."

"I don't know. I really don't. I never got the impression that she enjoyed his company. Some of the guys at work said she did it just to screw me over, but honestly, I think my feelings on the matter were beneath her notice. It sounds strange, but it seemed to me that she looked at the non-magical folk as not quite real, like they were just TV characters or something. I guess she just felt that magic goes with magic and muggle goes with muggle. Setting the world straight."

"Where did she take him?" asked Hermione.

"I don't know for sure. I would think she went back to her father's house."

"But he came back to Spinner's End, didn't he? She brought him back?"

"Not for a whole year." Hermione had the impression that Tobias Snape could have timed his son's absence down to the day or even the hour if she had asked.

The man in the image continued to drink, his hands trembling and his home empty.

"Not for a whole year."


	3. Snape the Monster

Tobias stood. "I need a drink," he said.

Once he had fixed a glass of mostly whiskey with very little ice, Hermione asked, "Did she stay when she brought him back?"

"In a manner of speaking. Her body was there, but just like before, she was in her own little miserable world. I came home from work one day and there he was, sitting on the floor. It's stupid what you remember. He had picked at a scab or a bug bite or something, and he was holding it, the little bit of dead skin or whatever it is, on the tip of his finger, examining it in the light. He looked up at me, then right back to the dead skin, as if I were just some furniture or a car gone by. Oh, he was different when he came back. Before he left, he was talking up a storm. The ladies at church couldn't get over how much he could say. But when he came back, he hardly talked at all. If you didn't ask him a question or give him an order, he acted like you hadn't said anything at all. If he could, he would answer you by pointing or nodding, or maybe one word if he had to. He didn't smile much, didn't cry much either. Mostly, he just looked intense. I asked him once, why he wouldn't talk."

The boy in the window filled in Severus's whispered answer. "So my thoughts don't get out."

Ron screwed up his face. "What's that mean?"

"I didn't know then and I don't know now. Might not mean anything. Kids are weird. Or it might be something she taught him. I was sort of hoping it would sound familiar to you three, something normal for magic kind."

They all shook their heads.

"And before he left, we had kept his hair short , neat and clean. But when he came back, he was getting scruffy and he wouldn't let me cut it at all. Wouldn't even let me wash it, comb it back out of his eyes." A sniff. "It's funny, the things that seemed so important at the time." He shook his head to clear the thought. "Anyways, it wasn't just him that was different. It was me too. I was...well, the social workers in the prison would say that I was an alcoholic and I suppose that was true. It was just hard to look at him, though. He was...cold somehow. The other kids were, they were scared of him."

"What do you mean?" Hermione asked.

"Well, for one thing, he couldn't take a joke at all. I mean, when he was little, before Eileen took off with him, if a kid knocked over his blocks, he just built them back up as if nothing had happened. He didn't even really look at the other kid, he acted like the blocks falling was just a force of nature. But after, it was like everything was an attack, everything was on purpose. If somebody bumped into him, it was never just an accident, they must've been trying to hit him or something."

"So he would attack back?" she prompted.

"Well, sort of. Sometimes."

"Sometimes?"

"He would ignore some things, seem totally unfazed by them. He would be fine, fine, fine, then bam!" Tobias brought a fist down onto his palm. "It was kind of like Duck Duck Goose."

Ron look confused; Hermione whispered "A children's game," with a look that promised to explain later.

"You knew it was coming, you just didn't know when. Like, duck, duck, duck, duck...except not goose. No, with Sev it was bloody Duck Duck Annihilation."

It was evidence, perhaps, of the intensity in Tobias's voice that none of them laughed at the odd phrase. "Well what did he do," said Harry, "What was the 'annihilation' part?"

Tobias shook his head slightly. "You couldn't always tell...I mean, you couldn't always be sure that it was him. We had a neighbor who – we lived in this run-down scrapheap – who had managed to get some flowers to grow in the tiny strip of mud in front of her house. She was always out there, carrying on, preening over the damn things. Well, one day she scolded Sev because she said hullo to him and he ignored her. Next day, all of her flowers are torn up, destroyed."

Ron shrugged. "That's not so bad. My brothers messed up my mom's garden more than once."

"Did they do it on purpose? Destroy it for no other reason than because it was something she loved? Because that's what Sev did. And that wasn't the only time he did it. When he was in 3rd form, he was complaining that his teacher didn't treat him fair, that she punished him for something another kid did, something maddening sure, but not a big deal. Just a detention. Well, his teacher was married to Frank Pierce, who was a supervisor down at the mill. On the Monday after Sev was all mad at his teacher, Frank doesn't show up. We figure he's sick or something, but it isn't like him not to call in. So after my shift, me and a few other guys went out looking for Frank. He wasn't hard to find, had spent the day crying into his liquor at the pub. So we ask him what's the matter and he tells us that he got an anonymous note telling him to go to some diner at some time and he does and what does he find but his brother being all too friendly with his wife of twenty years!" Tobias turned his head to the side. "He shows us the note and it's Sev's bloody handwriting." He leaned forward, toward his three interviewers and planted his hand on the table. "It was Sev's bloody handwriting! He was mad at her for some stupid little squabble and he went and broke up her marriage!"

The window showed Tobias's eyes grow wide, then narrow in anger, all for the briefest of moments before he passed the note on.

"That was when I started to think, this kid's...it wasn't just mischief, you see? I tried to keep control of him, but I couldn't stand to be around him. He just ignored me anyway. He would have listened to her, but she didn't bother. I mean, I think he would have listened to her...guess I don't know. But he just ran wild. Came and went whenever he pleased without so much as a goodbye."

Ron looked slightly unnerved. "What was he doing?"

"I haven't a clue. Sometimes I would see him, sneaking through alleys, but I don't know what he was trying to do. Eileen would ask him sometimes and demand that he look her in the eye. She'd even grab his head or freeze him with her wand, just to make him look, because he would squirm like her eyes were fire. But she was always trying to look him in the eye, as if that was going to fix matters." Tobias slowed, looked pensive suddenly. "Thinking on it now, I think that was why he kept his hair long – it covered up his face. At the time, I could never figure out why, but he fought tooth and nail when she tried to look at him."

"Legilimency." Harry blurted the word out before he could think better of it. Then, stumbling to explain it, "It's...it's sort of like mind reading, but with magic, and you have to look at the person and..." Harry trailed off, aware that this all sounded faintly ridiculous.

"Well, whatever it was, his hair was nasty, he was evil, I was drunk, and all Eileen seemed to care about was making him look her in the eye." Tobias looked to the side, sighed as if lost in thought, but the window behind him remained hazy. After a moment, he straightened and spoke. "So there was a boy, Willie Harper, who must have made Sev angry. They were in the same class at school, so I suppose they must have bickered there. I-" he stopped short, seemingly surprised with himself, "I guess I really don't know how it started, but I do know how it ended. Severus stole my hammer."

Ron interrupted in a shocked tone. "He attacked the other boy with a hammer?"

Tobias shook his head. "No, no, that would have been simple, wouldn't it? You remember, we lived in a very bad part of town. There were a lot of abandoned buildings. Sev must've gone into one, used the hammer to pry out a bunch of old rusted nails." Tobias slowed, as if considering his words carefully, while the window behind his head displayed a fogged image of a feral-looking boy. "He put the nails into an old sock, you see? And he got Willie Harper to chase him down a blind alley where he had climbed up a fire escape. And then he just leapt on top of him and went at him with the weapon he had made, the sock full of nails. He savaged the boy. Willie Harper," Tobias took an oddly defensive tone, "looked like he'd barely escaped being eaten by a pack of wolves."

Tobias looked his interviewers in the eye, each in turn. "You hear on TV – or maybe your kind don't, what do I know? – about kids who kill other kids and everybody is so sad for the parents of the kid who died, but I say spare a thought for the parents of the killer. Do you know what it's like to know that you brought that into the world? That if it weren't for your spawn, a life wouldn't have been destroyed?" His voice got higher, louder. "Willie Harper lost his eyes! They were scratched by the nails and they couldn't be repaired. All I could think was the last thing that little boy would ever see in his entire life, was my son tearing into his flesh!"

Tobias looked down, massaged his temples, and at last the window became clear. It showed a dingy corridor, painted a terrible aqua color on walls, floor, and ceiling. The florescent light flickered randomly. The only feature of note was a thin metal bench on the left wall, where a skinny, pale, greasy-haired boy sat hunched over. He was wearing ill-fitting corduroys and a stained white undershirt. A man – clearly Tobias – leaned over him, livid, finger waving. "That's not even your blood, is it? You're covered in somebody else's blood! Well, that's just lovely!" In the image, Tobias spun around, held his head in his hands and then turned back to face his still-impassive son. "You've made your choice, boy. You've made your choice. You're a monster. I should have smothered you in your cradle!" Severus showed no reaction. The fog returned, the image faded.

"You have to understand," said Tobias, pleaded Tobias, "you have to understand." Hermione's face bore a mixture of disgust and pity. Ron looked as though he rather agreed with Tobias's rant. "All I could think was that little boy would never see again, that the last think he would ever see was my son beating him with a sock full of nails. You have to understand, she took him from me, she changed him. If it weren't for her, none of this ever would have happened." As he had moments before, Tobias looked in turn at the faces of his three interviewers, defensive, looking for some sign that they felt for his situation. He dropped his head and kneaded his right hand with his left. "I gave up on him. I just...we lived in the same house, but we went our separate ways. I didn't...I didn't think it was worth the struggle anymore. I was obviously losing...I was-"

"Wait," said Harry, "an attack like that, people are going to get involved, call the police. What ended up happening?"

"At first, it was very big. The police were talking about whether they could send him to jail and if not, maybe some kind of secure school or something. But then...I think Eileen had something to do with it, though I can't be sure, of course. Everyone just stopped being angry about the matter. Far as I could tell, they all thought Willie had been injured by some stray dogs. Eileen said Sev wasn't going to school anymore, I guess to lay low or maybe just because she didn't want him spending any more time with non-magic folk."

"After a few months, I tried to- I tried to love him again, at least a little. I used to love to watch him sleep when he was a baby, curled up in a little ball, fingers perched just outside his mouth like he was thinking over whether or not to suck his thumb. So I tried watching him sleep again, but it wasn't the same at all." The window obliged. A monochrome boy – white skin, black hair, lay face-up in bed, body perfectly straight. His hands rested on his sternum, one on top of the other. Having attended far more funerals than most young men, Harry recognized the pose at once; Severus looked like a corpse laid out for viewing at a wake, differentiated only by the slight rise and fall of his chest.


End file.
